I just saw a referral from adf.ly:


I didn't click on that link, because I didn't know what it actually was, even apparently it's some sort of shortened URL. I googled it and read a few pages of results.

Clearly, I dislike adf.ly.

Making money out of your shortened link is fine, but it's not fair (because the owner of linked content isn't getting anything if differ than link creator) and you can bet that attracts bad people, who makes money by cheating.

(Please forgive me for not linking you to what I've read, I intentionally do not want to link to those pages)

In one discussions, OP said his Google AdSense account got banned because of adf.ly traffic, which he bought. So, you see how this is going. People buy traffic, although I have no idea how this kind of things work, it must be different than AdWords' method, that might be the reason why he got banned.

One reply is very interesting, How about you do that to your competing website to get them banned? I have to say this is devious. You buy them some traffic or make tons of shortened links for them, they would be astonished by sudden traffic and ecstatic by upcoming paycheck, which would never come.

From the search results, there are a lot of bots and scripts, well, for cheating to next level, I believe. One can automatically convert all links in your content to adf.ly.

Some people are really using every measure to make money online, it's pretty ugly through my eyes. Why can't they write good content and only wish receiving good feedback? If you can have those, people naturally will link to, refer to, and the worst, steal your content, whether you like or not. Wasting time doing those cheats, SEO tricks, just pathetic.

By the way, I still don't know the link in the screenshot will lead me to. I didn't click, because it can be fake referrer and probably links to other site. So, that's another method you can cheat.